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White Mage Soul

August 27, 2014 by Belghast

The Best Intentions

Yesterday I read a post by Missy Mojo lamenting just how “un-fun” Blaugust has become for her. I fear that there are a lot more people out there feeling the same. I hear the same sort of lament in Kodra’s voice each night as he says he really needs to do his blog post. The idea behind Blaugust was simple, to challenge people to do the same thing I do and write something, anything every day. The thing is that the challenge grew legs of its own and sucked in a lot of newly minted bloggers along with the veterans. I figured I might have five or so veteran bloggers take up the challenge as I did a year and a half ago. The thing is I didn’t get there over night, and in fact had been blogging for around four years before I decided to post regularly.

This is probably the worst kind of event for someone new to the craft to start under, and we had huge participation by folks who started just for this even or started under the Newbie Blogger Initiative. I promise my intention was not to grind people down with daily blogging, but instead to fill the gap that often happens in later summer for content. In many ways it has worked better than I could have imagined, and tragedy in my own life has caused me to fall behind in the reading department. My biggest fear is that this whole experiment will cause large lapses in content for the newer folks like Missy. If you are doing this every day and not enjoying it, then it kinda defeats the point of blogging in the first place. I give you complete permission to drop out of the contest with no hard feelings or lamentation.

White Mage Soul

The primary goal of yesterday for me was to get my conjurer to 30 so that I could become a White Mage. Since I already have a 50 tank, 50 ranged and 50 melee… I felt like I needed some sort of max level healer at my disposal as well. As far as healers go, I have enjoyed my time healing dungeons on the conjurer far more than I have enjoyed any healer in a long time. The style just feels natural and I can usually land in a relaxing rhythm during each dungeon. I figure the healing will get more complicated as I get more tools at my disposal but for the time being I am enjoying myself. I had leveled Arcanist to 15 over the weekend in preparation for nearing 30 conjurer, since White Mage is a combination of the two. I might return to leveling Arcanist at some point so I can become a scholar, but I feel no real pressing need to either.

The thing I found funny was that the level 30 Conjurer quest was far more difficult than the quest to actually become a white mage. Even moreso I found it odd that in order to do my quest to get the unicorn mount I had to shift back to Conjurer as well. In any case I finished both and am now an up and coming white mage ready to take on the world. After coming home from the rosary last night I worked my way up to 32 so that hopefully someday tonight I can start running Brayflox for gear. I have two pieces of the battlemage set but I would really like to get the rest of it, or at the very least the robe. Additionally I would not mind seeing the white mage ring drop either.

Gearing the Warrior

Since it is pretty certain that I will be needing my Warrior for when we start Binding Coil of Bahamut hopefully soonish, I opted to start rolling on Warrior gear in Syrcus tower. Yesterday Tam and I decided to queue together for our weekly loot run. Unlike other games you can run Syrcus as often as you like, but you can only take a single piece of loot from there each week. The nice thing is this allows you to keep running it in the hopes of getting that one item you need. Since most of the people in there are after the item to craft their weathered weapon almost all of the gear rots, or at the very least it isn’t terribly contested. The run started off really smoothly, and our group had a warrior tanking… which to some extent made my heart sink a little. My goal going into the place was the pick up some warrior loot, but I brought my dragoon just as a backup in case something phenomenal dropped.

The first boss went extremely smoothly, and I was feeling like our tank was doing an amazing job. On the first boss the warrior gauntlets dropped and moments afterwards the tank was asking for us to pass or roll so he could equip them. We all did as asked and the moment he got the loot he dropped from the party. This was the first time I had seen this happen, but apparently it is a frequent occurrence in Syrcus. The awesome part though is that he was replaced by a really well geared Gladiator, and on the very next boss the Warrior chest piece dropped, allowing me to pick it up easily. So that combined with picking up the soldiery tome ring takes my Warrior to 91 ilevel and more than ready for the Coil.

#FFXIV

Family but Not Family

August 26, 2014 by Belghast

Sleeping In

This mornings post is coming significantly late because yesterday was extremely draining. I am not sure how much of it I said in previous posts but yesterday I went to the funeral of my Great Aunt in Oklahoma City. Both my Mother and Father have their own medical issues to where if they were forced to drive it on their own they would have struggled seriously. Right now my mother is going through some back problems, and my dad vision problems… so I knew that I really needed to offer to drive. They are the type that would not likely have come out and asked for it, but the moment I offered they latched onto the idea with both hands. Multiple times during the day my mom said how grateful she was that I drove. I hate driving, especially on longer trips, but I figured it was a thing I needed to do.

The draining aspect was that I felt like I was essentially parenting my parents. My mothers hearing has been going through the years and the multiple hour trips to and from the city involved a lot of me yelling at the backseat so she could hear me. Anytime my father and I would attempt to carry on a conversation she would mishear a snippet of it and start off on a tangent. Which was fine but trying to jump like that all day long including when we were inches away from each other… really can wear you down. I am starting to wonder just how long it will be before we need to get her a hearing aide. Her mother/my grandmother wore one for as long as I can remember, so I am sure that bad hearing is simply another ailment that runs in the family. Since I seem to be a sponge for the bad ailments that both of my parents have… I will likely inherit that one as well.

Family but Not Family

Something about this batch of the family that you have to understand is that even though we are only two hours apart… I have not seen most of them in years. The last time I saw any of them I believe was at my grandmothers funeral almost a decade ago. I do not believe that any of them came up for my grandfathers funeral, which I guess makes sense as he was not related by blood to any of them. So a few of them I have seen within the last decade, but the bulk of them I have not seen since I was five or six. A couple of the people were recognizable from my memory banks, others were not at all. One of them I only remembered as the person who bit me once at a family reunion at Great Grandpa Smiths house… and he has been dead for longer than I can remember. Another one of the daughters wasn’t even alive back then, so I had never met her in any form.

This brand of the family seems to have a genetic disposition for girls… my great aunt had two daughters, and then each had two daughters… then when you get to the grandchildren there were something like 25 daughters and 1 single boy. But if you think about it… my grandmother and great aunt came from a batch of four girls and a single boy, so maybe it is just a thing with the smith DNA favoring females. My grandmother and great aunt talked every single day until my grandmother passed away, so there was an extremely tight bond there. Most of my recollection of my great aunt and uncle was from them coming to my hometown to visit. My grandparents were dairy farmers so they didn’t really go anywhere… they could only go so far as they could get back home by milking time. As a result people came to visit them… not the other way around, so large swaths of time passed between visitations.

It is weird to step into a room where everyone knows you, but you barely know them at all. Maybe I just wasn’t listening as my grandmother tried to relate all of the details of their lives, and maybe it was just simpler because my grandma only actually had three grandchildren to talk about instead of a veritable army of them. In any case it creates this whole situation where you know they are all related to you, but none of them really feel familiar like family should feel. They all have really amazing families from the looks of it. I went up to one of the girls husbands, and asked if his name was “Mike” because for some reason I knew that it was. Finally we figured that that he manages a nearby QuikTrip store that I go to pretty often. I would love to get to know them all better, but unfortunately the connective glue is gone. With my grandma gone and great aunt gone… as sad as it sounds I doubt the family will get together again like this. My generation just doesn’t seem to be as well connected to the past as the previous ones.

Another Weapon Down

When I finally got home last night I decided to start working on my Bard relic weapon quest line. As we have gotten people up to fighting level I spent a bit of time over the weekend barding it up. There are just situations where double dragoons is not the best idea in the world, and I don’t necessarily mind playing at a bard, in fact for short periods of time I find it extremely relaxing. Over the course of a series of dungeons run to catch Kodra up to being able to do high level roulette, I picked up enough upgrades to take my bard to ilevel 65. The biggest problem was that I still had a less than optimal weapon, and that more than anything was limiting my damage output. Since I was not feeling up to playing with the big kids last night, who unlocked the various zones needed to do elite roulette I decided to quietly plug away on the relic weapon.

Thankfully I had the foresight to get Warenwolf to bind my materia to the precursor weapon some time ago. All I needed to do was start in on the quest chain proper. The Dhorne Chimaera was as easy as they came, and within moments of queuing it popped and then about ten minutes later I had collected that first piece. The next piece involved running Amdapor Keep, and I have to say this was probably the trickiest part of the night. The queue took about 20 minutes, but when it finally popped the team that I ran it with went extremely smoothly… zero wipes and other than the tank pulling things a little differently than I was used to I had my rune in about thirty minutes time. After some running about I was on the kill 24 mobs step, which took a little bit of time to do but with my healer Chocobo out it went pretty easily.

Next up was the Hydra in Halatali, and it died extremely quickly as well. I think it might have died faster than the time it took me to queue for it. Finally was the last three primal fights, and this would have gone quicker had I not queued for normal mode Ifrit first instead. I guess I was more tired than I realized. Both Hardmode Ifrit and Garuda died in a single attempt, and then Titan took about three before we managed to beat the boss. I still have yet to get the whole rock bomb thing every single time. Like there is one specific pattern that always gives me fits, but overall while it took all evening it was definitely a doable task to get my relic weapon quickly. I hear there was a bit of a rollback last night due to the massive denial of service attack going on… so here is hoping I log back in again this morning and have my relic. Now I just need to finish collecting the bookrocks to be able to make it a Zenith weapon.

#FFXIV

A Darker Doctor

August 24, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 19

Last night we recorded the latest episode of AggroChat, and welcomed back Kodra from GenCon. For the most part the AggroChat crew has had their heads firmly planted in Final Fantasy XIV and that much hasn’t changed. Kodra regaled us with the tales of what he did with his time at the convention. LARPs are one of those things I have always been interested in but never really participated in. I did a little bit of a local World of Darkness LARP in High School, but it wasn’t really my scene. As Kodra talks about the ones that happen at GenCon it feels far more like improvisational theater than gaming. In any case it sounds awesome and if I ever make it to GenCon I will totally join in the fun with him.

Additionally we talk a little bit about MMO design and theory and how Final Fantasy XIV has made tweaks to the game in order to support the community aspect. So far it is working because that is the overwhelming thing that I am enjoying the most from our time playing. We also talk a bit about Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition and our upcoming campaign. There has been some talk about maybe streaming it, but I somehow doubt that is actually going to happen. Rae talks at length about her awesome character concept, and I talk a bit about the Grudgebearer Cleric I will be playing as well. This weeks episode had a very non-video gaming feel to it, and it was pretty enjoyable.

A Darker Doctor

Yesterday was the day the world was introduced to the new Peter Capaldi Doctor Who. So as the world was enthralled by the BBC airing of the show and subsequent BBC America rebroadcast… where was I? Well I spent my afternoon shopping with my wife and then my evening recording AggroChat. With all of the weight loss my wife has gone through, she pretty much is in dire straights on trying to find a new wardrobe for the school year. I figured it was far more important to help her find that, than to sit at home and catch Doctor Who as it was originally broadcast. As a result I have just finished watching the show this morning, and I have to say so far I am very pleased. I don’t want to go into any spoilers really, because hopefully you are going to watch it yourself.

First off I have to say I am of mixed opinion on the new Doctor Who intro theme. You can listen to it here as someone has uploaded it to youtube already. It just feels over produced to me… and extremely “muddy” if that makes sense. I can tell that they went went back to the fourth doctor theme and sampled it heavily…. and that aspect I like, but all of the modern crap that they seem to have layered on top of it is frustrating. I would love to see them just make a nice clean Doctor Who opening theme without all of the auditory graffiti. I am sure over time I will get used to it, but right now it is just grating on my nerves. As far as the show itself the production quality was impeccable as always. I always like the episode that happens right after a regeneration because you get to watch the doctor in his most vulnerable state, when he isn’t quite sure of this new body.

With Capaldi it feels like gone is the zany doctor that flails about, and a different form of “Mad Man” has replaced it. I am liking the darker take on the doctor so far, and I am also liking the fact that the series is distancing itself from “companion as love interest”. I am sure to some of the more modern fans this will be a point of frustration, but to someone who has watched a lot of Doctor Who over the years, I prefer the days when the companion was just that… a travelling companion for the adventure. I think the franchise will be in solid hands for awhile now, and I would love to see Capaldi have a run to rival Tom Baker. I am tired of the Doctor changing quite as often as he has been, especially since we have long retconned the original storyline of a limited number of regenerations. Overall I enjoyed it, but I look forward to seeing more episodes to really set my opinion of it in stone.

Return of Ultima Weapon

While waiting on the audio to render last night for AggroChat I got pulled into an 8 man raid with the rest of my Final Fantasy XIV guild on Cactuar. One of the quests that was added to the game post launch in Mor Dhona takes unlocks the Hard Mode version of the Ultima Weapon primal encounter. I won’t go into any of the details surrounding the Ultima Weapon itself because spoilers… but in theory we had heard that everything about the Hard Mode of the encounter is significantly harder than the first few turns of the Bahamats Coil raid. After last night I am guessing that was in fact the case. This fight is absolutely insane, but I am pleased to say after three tries we managed to down it and clear it from all of our quest logs. I returned to my role as a tank, and since at this point I somehow managed to pass Ashgar in gear I ended up starting off the fight and playing the role of Soak of a lot of the bombs that happen during the fight.

What makes the fight so cool is that it is the first tank swap encounter that I have run into here in Final Fantasy XIV. This is a common mechanic in World of Warcraft now as a way of keeping both tanks engaged in the fight, and they seem to do it very well here as well. Now the swaps have to be timed carefully, but since Ash and I have worked together on many occasions this ended up fine. Essentially you have to hit provoke which raises your threat to 1+the highest targets threat, and then start spamming your highest aggro ability to make sure you gain a decent lead. Basically during the swap I would hit provoke and then spam butchers block a few times to make sure I had a nice lead. At this point the target would peel away from Ashgar easily and I would be in control again for another three stacks of the debuff.

Now the coolest aspect of the fight is that we didn’t even realize there were weapons to be gotten. I feel like this fight is worth more than an ilevel 80 item… but in any cases it was one hell of a fun encounter to be done with guildies. As hard as it was, I could totally see myself doing it again because this felt like a true challenge. It required each of us to do something to add to the fight. Towards the end of the fight we had to have a few DPS sacrifice themselves to make sure all of the bombs got blocked, and then we slowed dps allowing the healers to catch up and ressurect them. It was awesome seeing each person fully engaged in what had to be done. I am so proud of my guildies for accomplishing this, and now I have no doubt at all that we will do fine making progress in the Coil.

#DoctorWho #AggroChat #FFXIV

Change is Scary

August 19, 2014 by Belghast

Gatekeeping a Hobby

Yesterday was one of those strange days where a lot of people were talking about the same ideas. I was not privy to the original source that sparked the discussion, but several of my friends over twitter were talking about the definition of a “real gamer”. It seems that someone was spouting off in their lack of knowledge that tablet and mobile gamers were in some way lesser gamers than the those on the console or PC. This once again gets back to the definition of what exactly a gamer is. Over on the Moderate Peril blog he questioned exactly why we need a label at all. In other hobbies, you don’t see the attempt to exclude people the way that we do within gaming.

I am very much one of those people that wants to assemble as many awesome people from as many different points of view around me as I can. As a result I am always open to new interpretations of what exactly gaming is. While I am not a huge fan of mobile and tablet gaming, just because the types of games I enjoy playing do not translate well without physical controls… that doesn’t mean there are not actual gamers there as well. If you boot up bejeweled while waiting on a bus, you are just as much of a gamer as someone who camps a rare spawn for 20 hours. There have been times in the past that I found mobile gaming to be lacking, but at this point there are tons of really detailed games that you simply cannot get on any other platform.

After seeing Hearthstone on a tablet for example, I feel like any other platform is somehow lesser because of just how cleanly it works there. After playing Carcassonne on my phone, it felt so natural and perfect to be playing a turn based board game that way. The big area that I am seeing taking over the mobile markets is the various kinds of simulation games. While it started out with things like Tiny Tower, it has involved into extremely detailed and lengthy games. Similarly I can see a lot of role-playing games flourishing on the mobile markets. All of these things are real games, played by real gamers. Shouldn’t we be including everyone in our big happy family instead of trying to exclude them?

Change is Scary

The cynic in me wants to think that the exclusion comes from a form of gaming Hipsterism. The realist in me however sees that it is pure and simple fear. Change is a scary thing, and we get rooted in our own inertia of the way we think things ought to be. This is the gaming equivalent of “I walked to school uphill both directions and I liked it”. In order to stay a vibrant and interesting market it needs to adapt to trends. While I deeply love the Fallout series for example, I don’t expect every game to be the Fallout series. Additionally while I have certain things that I like to play, it is perfectly okay that things exist that I don’t want to play. Guild Wars 2 has become somewhat of a whipping boy for me over the years as a way of explaining what I don’t want to play. That said I love that it exists because it makes a large number of my friends excited and happy to be playing it.

Expecting everything to be custom tailored for you is the surest way to end up angry in the end. It is like walking into a store and complaining that a red shirt isn’t blue enough for you. If you don’t want to wear a red shirt, don’t buy a red shirt and then expect it to change into the color you want it to be. If you are like me and don’t like sports games… simply ignore the fact that the sports games exist and move on with your life. If you want to spend your nights playing nothing but Japanese Role-Playing games then do that with your free time, but realize that there is still a lot of room for games in even that niche that you may not like. As the video states… it is perfectly okay to not like things, but don’t be a dick about the things you don’t like. There should always be room in our community for folks that don’t look, think, act or experience things in the same way as we do.

Harder Isn’t Better

Similar to all of the above, there was a second topic floating around that Liore specifically wrote about. I guess the old argument had resurfaced that you aren’t a “real gamer” unless you are always playing everything on the hardest settings. For starters I don’t even know what a “real gamer” is, because if you are playing games of any sort you are a gamer. There is no sign that says you must be this tall to ride this ride. Now granted it is perfectly okay for there to be skill checks in order to unlock certain things. These give us challenge and something to push for. That said when a person accomplishes said skill check, it does not immediately make them a better person than someone who didn’t. I find it completely valid that some content be gated behind these skill check mechanics, but the sort of elitism and classism that surrounds them needs to die in a fire.

Similarly playing something on hard mode does not immediately make you a better person. I personally mostly play games on medium to easy mode depending on what exactly I want from an experience. More often than not I am playing a specific game because I want to experience the story, and while I enjoy the moment to moment game play I am not there because I want the rush of excitement from being able to twitch my controls at exactly the right moment over and over enough times to unlock a special achievement. I just want to see the story through the point of view of the experiences of my character. In these cases I absolutely play on easy mode, and I personally love it when a game is like Wolfenstein New Order and allows me to drop the difficulty on the fly in the middle of a game session if I encounter a roadblock.

“Twitch moments” are absolutely the number one thing that kills my gaming experience. When I encounter a moment that is significantly harder than the rest of the game play surrounding it, that is often a roadblock that keeps me from completing the game. In an MMO or a Role-Playing game I can wander about and level up or get significantly better gear to mitigate the difficulty. In most single player games however I simply have to have faster reflexes. While I realize I can train myself to have faster reflexes, years of not playing twitch games have caused me to dull significantly. The problem is… most games are not worthy the time commitment it would take to improve. I don’t generally find achievement getting fun, nor do I find repeating the same mission over and over until I finally grasp it. One of two things happens, either I lower the difficulty and beat it… or I simply stop playing the game likely to never return to it.

So I ask you the question, am I no longer a gamer because I do this? No and I feel like you would tend to agree or you wouldn’t be wasting your time reading my blog on a regular basis. I am a gamer because I game, not because I live up to some artificial bar set by someone being elitist and exclusionary. Gaming is about having fun, and if in the course of whatever you choose to do you are enjoying yourself… then mission accomplished. While gaming is about the journey and not necessarily about the destination… anything that stalls you out along the path is a bad thing. This is why I love mechanics like the Echo system in Final Fantasy XIV and the system that World of Warcraft has. Where over a series of wipes you are slowly buffed until you can defeat the content, because it maintains bragging rights for the folks who don’t need the buff… but still allows things to be fully accessible by anyone else. At the end of the day I am an easy mode gamer… deal with it.